An Open Letter to the St.
Louis Post-Dispatchby Jim Glover
www.dissidentvoice.org
November 15, 2005

Dear
SLPD:

In your editorial of November 12, you
continue to beat up on military whistleblower Jimmy Massey, who had the
temerity to point out that our brave men and women in uniform in Iraq
might not be acting as humanely as our mythology would have them do. You
conclude by congratulating yourself as follows: Absolute truth is hard to
come by, but as the bloggers bloviate and the blowhards blow, good
reporters and good newspapers are out there digging.

Really?

Perhaps, then, you could answer a few questions that have been bothering
me about good newspapers:

1. Why has the Post-Dispatch done more digging into one former
Marineís allegations which are actually quite consistent with many other
stories reported in non-US newspapers than it did into the far more
important allegations that our government was making in the build-up to
the illegal Iraq invasion?

2. Why was the Post-Dispatch, for example, not out there digging
into those statements by Bush, Cheney, Rice at al. about WMDs and
stockpiles of anthrax and dual purpose aluminum tubes and yellow cake from
Niger?

3. Where were your good reporters when you acted as if you were nothing
more than Tony Blairís stenographer by passing along his ridiculous fairy
tale of Iraq needing just 45 minutes to wreak unspeakable havoc on
England?

4. Why did you virtually ignore statements by well-informed dissenters
like former weapons inspector Scott Ritter?

5. Why did you never even mention the (well documented) story, reported by
Newsweek on February 24, 2003, that Gen. Hussein Kamel, a key Iraqi
dissident source used by the Bush war promoters to scare everyone, had
also said that all the weapons he told our CIA about had been
destroyed?[1] A web search of your archives
shows that you were aware of Newsweekís existence because you
passed along otherNewsweek stories from that time,
such as one about actor Nick Nolteís drug problem [2],
which, it would seem, was more important.

6. Why did you not dig into an explanation for why statements about Iraqís
threat to the U.S. changed dramatically soon after 9/11, even before there
was a chance of any real new intelligence? For example, Colin Powell told
Face the Nation in February 2001 that we have been able to keep
weapons from going into Iraq. It's been quite a success for ten years.
[3] And Tenet, also in February 2001, told Congress that
although Iraq should be always be under suspicion, we do not have any
direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Operation Desert Fox
to reconstitute its WMD programs. [4]

7. Why do you find it appropriate to say in
two different articles that Massey lied outright about his alleged U.S.
war crimes, yet you never use the L-word in relation to the clearly much
bigger and clearly more deliberate lies by our government that led to the
destruction of an entire country?

8. Why have you been so reluctant to dig into the many other war crimes we
have more recently committed and continue to commit every day? Why, for
example, did you find it unnecessary to even mention the recent showing on
Italian television of a film called Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre,
which depicts, among other crimes, the burning away of Iraqi civilians
skin by internationally-banned weapons used by the U.S., and contains
damning testimony from other U.S. combatants that sound a lot like what
Massey said? [5]

9. Why have you not dug into the reports of
our troops isolating entire Iraqi cities from the outside world cutting
off their electricity, for example -- and then occupying their hospitals,
killing civilians, and destroying as many as two-thirds of residents
homes, making refugees of hundreds of thousands at a time?
[6]

10. Have you decided that the literally
thousands of reports of U.S. war crimes in reputable newspapers around the
world are ALL merely bloggers bloviating and blowhards blowing.

11. Your bashing of Massey has mainly been done by an embedded reporter
named Ron Harris. [7] Do you honestly feel that
government-sanctioned and censored writers constitute an honorable and
trustworthy system of good reporting and good newspaper work?

12. Your publisher, the once-widely renowned Pulitzer Inc., was gobbled up
last June by Lee Enterprises, a Delaware-based corporation that now owns
58 daily papers in 23 states, and nearly 300 other shops and businesses.
According to its web site, five of its six top priorities for 2006 do not
include any reference to good reporting or quality journalism. The
exception is the priority of strong local news. The priorities do include,
however, grow[ing] revenue creatively and rapidly, and exercising careful
cost controls. [8]

May we assume, then, that the purpose of the Post-Dispatch is
officially no longer actual journalism, but rather the selling of
advertising in the most efficient way possible in order to best enrich the
shareholders and upper-level managers of Lee Enterprises?

13. Any thoughts on why so many American readers have indeed lost
confidence in their newspapers, and turn instead to bloviating bloggers
and online papers from other, less developed countries?

Jim Glover
lives in Carbondale, Illinois. He can
be reached at his
blogsite, Plagiarize This. Other Articles by
Jim Glover